Winter, soul seasons part 3

Soul seasons are not always as distinguishable as the seasons experienced up north (or for my Aussie friends--down south).  Sometimes the seasons of our souls are subtle like the seasons in Florida or Southeast Asia.  But occasionally we go through a season in our lives when it is obvious that we are experiencing drought, or death--where it feels like our souls are bare of all that is comfortable, known, and bright.  In those times we wish we could escape the cold and the discomfort and feel the warmth of spring, the hope of new life.
This past March--when spring was breaking through the winter soil--I found myself descending into the darkness of winter.  After spending so much of my effort and time on trying to fix my problems--namely Noah's eczema--without relief, I began to experience despair and anxiety.  I had gone all out trying to figure out how to heal Noah's skin.  I didn't want to use steroid cream, so we pursued natural alternatives.  We were eating gluten free, dairy free, processed free...basically everything free.  It was such an extreme way of eating that it made it hard (impossible) to eat out or even at other people's homes.  It was exhausting, but I did it because I truly believed it was going to heal Noah of his eczema.  Instead, we watched his skin get worse and worse.  We pressed on because I thought it was detox...and that soon it would heal.  But then Noah got impetigo from a classmate.  Impetigo for most children is minor...but not for skin compromised by eczema.  This began the downwards spiral for both Noah's skin, and my emotional stability.  Even after the impetigo was treated, Noah's skin was looking worse.  He would scream when water touched his skin, making showers nearly impossible.  Finally, we succumbed to the steroid cream that I had been so fearful of.  By this time I was desperate for relief...yet still fearful of all the worst case scenarios I had read about surrounding steroid cream.  But it seemed we had little choice...so I made my first step towards surrender and letting go of control.
Who likes to feel out of control?  Me, me!!  (yeah, right!)   Life feels like it's flowing and smooth when it seems all is under control.  When disruptions occur we scurry to bring things back in alignment--to get things under control again.  But what happens when things don't "get back under control" easily?  When life feels out of control and we really don't know how to fix it?  It's unpleasant to live in that space where things aren't as we want them to be.   To let go and let be.  To choose life despite the fact that life isn't as we imagined or idealized.   For me this took the shape of health issues that wouldn't resolve quickly.   Facing my inability to "heal" my son's skin felt like failure.  It also presented itself as an immovable obstacle to our family's ability to enjoy life and move forward (sans eczema).   I had obsessed over the perfect diet to heal my son's eczema, and pictured life happily ever after once it was healed.  I had imagined everything working out well, and counted on it.  But when my plan backfired and we found ourselves making dermatologist appointments, driving three hours to Miami to see a specialist, and rubbing steroid cream all over Noah as thick as peanut butter...I was at the end of myself.  "I couldn't heal Noah.  My plan didn't work.  What went wrong?!!"   How could this be a part of the plan?  I had prayed that God would heal Noah, I had prayed for wisdom on how to help Noah get better, but I had not been ready to accept that his skin might not be healed...or that the healing could come from a more traditional approach (steroid cream).  Because things didn't go as I had imagined, I felt stuck.  How would we ever get to that "happily ever after" part of life?  I sunk into a sea of despair and anxiety.  I guess you could say that anxiety is my default when I feel out of control and I don't know how to fix it.
Well, since it's highly improbable that anxiety just sprouts up out of nowhere, I think it's fair to say that I was finally facing the seeds of fear and worry that were deeply rooted in my life.  Life mantras that I had built my belief system on were baring themselves.  My sense of failure was rooted in a (mis) belief that it was all up to me to heal Noah so that we could move on to the "happily ever after" part of our lives.  I had this idea that I needed to fix all that was wrong in my life so that I could be happy and free.

Remember that verse my friend shared with me a few years back? (see soul seasons part 1)

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

Enter the dark night of the soul (or the winter of the soul).
Easter was on the horizon and I thought to myself "well, maybe I will have a resurrection experience in my life this Easter."  That was me hoping that I would pull up and out of my depression quickly.  Easter came, Easter went, but the darkness did not dissipate.  It became obvious that this was not a quick fix sort of crisis.  It wasn't going to be one of those times that a bandaid solution could lift me out of the pit of despair.  May came, May went.  June came, June went... I have to say that I was beginning to wonder just how long this "winter" was going to last.  Two months? Three months?  Meanwhile, I was searching for a counselor that could help me--but this was no easy task having just moved to Florida.  Even finding a few friends whom I could lean on proved difficult--who likes to make new friends when they're in the midst of a dark season?!  Ha!!!  (The good news is that you know they're real friends if they like you when you're at your lowest point!)

In the past few months I finally sense a slow creeping up and out of the pit of darkness, but I have still not found myself standing on top of a hill in the summer of my soul.  I would say that I'm somewhere between the end of winter and early spring--when the two seasons blur and you're still not sure if spring is breaking forth or winter is still unrelenting.  There are days when I see glimpses of new sprouts, places where death has happened and new life is finally making its way through the winter soil.  But there are days when all I see are the bare branches of a winter tree--wondering when I will feel the glory of leaves covering my tree once again.  When I will feel the warmth of the summer sun on my back, and hear the songs of the birds as they perch on my strong (weathered) branches.

I am seeing that death really is necessary for new life to spring up.  And just like we experience the four seasons over and over again each year, soul seasons come and go and are not merely a one time event.  Sometimes the death might be small and barely noticeable.  A small realization that opens our blind eyes to see something we hadn't seen before.  A chance to let go of something in our lives that was holding us back.  Other times the winter is grander and longer, and we truly wonder if spring will ever come.  But even far north in Mongolia and Alaska, summer arrives every year--no matter how long, cold and dark the winter was.  Spring always comes.

And so as I live in the midst of a long winter, I am finding that my way forward is to surrender to the death and rest of winter.  In the winter time a seed is resting in the cold winter soil, waiting for when the temperature is right for it to break through the soil.  But the seed cannot force this process to happen any faster than nature will allow it.  And so really, winter is about learning to surrender, learning to rest, and learning that it's not about the seed's effort to sprout--but about the timing.  If the seed did not let go and die, making its way into the cold winter soil, it would not experience the spring when life begins to flow from it once again.
And so I wait.  Can I feel the nourishment of the winter soil, healing me so that I can bloom when tis time?  Can I allow myself to be but a small seed, fertilized by the nutrients I need in order to grow once again?   Can I trust that spring will come?

While it's so much easier to say yes to spring and summer, may I say yes to winter and all that it is doing in my life.  May I let go and stop resisting the necessity of death and rest so that I can grow and produce life when it's time.
...and surely, spring will come...because it always does!

Dynamite (soul seasons, part 2)

We moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand in June 2013.  As we drove across the border between Laos and Thailand for the last time there was a lot of excitement and anticipation about the year ahead.  Pete and I had decided to take a sabbatical year--a year to rest, listen, be restored, and see what was next.  Neither of us knew what lay ahead and beyond a sabbatical year in Thailand, but we were hopeful and optimistic.  The hardest part of our decision to leave Laos was leaving behind friendships.  The friendships that we made in Laos were some of the closest and dearest friends we have made along the way...

I vividly remember our drive from Laos to Thailand.  The windy road through the mountains, stops along the way to refuel and buy banana chips or pho (a bowl of noodles for lunch), and the song we played more times than I count.  Thanks to Silas' end of the year school performance in Laos, the song Dynamite became our boys' most requested song to listen to.  Can't say I would ever have chosen that song to be our moving theme song, but there it was...the song that seared itself into all of our memories as we made our move from what was known to an unknown future.   We blasted that song as loud as our ears could handle, and "danced" to the beat lifting our hands in the air (just as he sings in the song).  I felt free and light as we drove away from a place that had held so much heaviness and darkness in my life.  (Yes, I know that you cannot leave your problems behind just by moving, but I will admit that in this situation I think I believed I was doing just that.)  We didn't listen to that song much after that drive, but anytime the boys ask to listen to it now I am instantly back on that windy mountain road feeling the lightness in my heart and the excitement of what lay in store for us.

soul seasons, part 1

I don't like cold weather--never have--and so living in Asia, and now Florida, has worked nicely for this warm weather girl.  But after living in Kentucky for a few years, my love of fall grew.  Growing up in Oklahoma, fall was occasionally filled with bright colors, but mostly the leaves turned brown and just fell off the trees.  But Kentucky--wow, the falls were brilliant.  When we moved to Southeast Asia and Facebook came along, I would look with jealousy at my friends' pictures of their little babies in piles of leaves.  Especially the Gingko tree outside of Asbury Seminary (where Pete and I met and got married).  The Gingko tree would hold onto its yellow leaves and then all at once they would fall, and your window of opportunity to get pictures with your family was brief.  You had to time it--get there when the leaves had dropped and were blanketing the ground, but before the grounds crew came to rake them up.  Pete and I were fortunate to enjoy this picture feast twice--once when we were back from Laos with Silas.  Silas was just learning to walk, and I was so excited to get pictures of him standing in the midst of a yellow whirlwind of color, falling into the pile of leaves, laying on the leaves making leaf angels with our arms and legs.  And then once more when we moved back to Kentucky for a year and had Noah.  I still like to glimpse at these photos now and then, because who can deny the beauty of fall?  Even I who has chosen to live in warm tropical climates misses the beauty of fall.

But today I was struck by the rejection of seasons in my own life.  It seems there are seasons in our lives, just as there are seasons in nature.  In that way, living in a tropical climate disconnects us from the reality of soul seasons--and the necessity of experiencing seasons in our own lives.  None of us gets to live an eternal spring or summer--those are the seasons when growth and life flourishes.  But fall and winter remind us that even the trees and plants need a season of death and rest so that life can come once again.  Even in places where we do not experience a true fall or winter, I can still see the pause that comes in the cooler months.  It's not as dramatic as up north, but it's still there--a time of resting when the greens are not as bright and brilliant.  In Laos the winter months meant the cease of rain, and the red dirt began to cover over all of the plants.  So while the trees were still green beneath the dirt, everything looked dead.  By April there was a definite longing in all of us for the rains to start so that everything could be washed and made clean and new again.  

While nature reminds us that death is necessary for life to come once again, it is not something that we welcome in our own lives.  If anything, I can picture myself being the fall tree resisting the natural tendency for my leaves to fall.  "No leaf, don't go!  How can I be a tree without you leaves!"  But the leaves do what is in their nature--they fall.  It is a time of letting go, resting and making room for new life to come again.   

In the last year of our time in Laos I was really fragile.  I was burnt out, emotionally depleted, and physically struggling with health issues.  I was doing everything I could to repair myself, to get better, and to flourish.  It was painful to admit that I didn't have what it took to be a superstar missionary, a superstar mom, a superstar wife.  I was human, and I was fighting my frailty.  But when    I look back on that year now, I see that it was the year I experienced God's arms around me in the form of a group of women.  We would meet each Tuesday afternoon.  It was my lifeline.  I don't think I could have survived that year sanely without that group to look forward to each week.  One week a woman who I didn't know joined our group.  She was visiting from another province in Laos, and she sat in with us.  It was a week when I couldn't hold my tears back, they flowed like a river betraying the feelings of grief, sadness, discouragement I was holding inside.  At the end of our time together, this visiting woman said that she felt she had a verse for me--John 12:24.  

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

I was quiet.  This wasn't really the verse that I had hoped to hear.  How can this be encouraging to me?  This verse speaks of death...going into the winter soil.  But I wrote the verse down because somehow I felt it really was for me.  My only hope was that I was experiencing the winter of my soul already--that this verse was not pointing to a winter to come.  Perhaps the verse was saying "your spring is coming".

  to be continued...